


Of Certain Poets About To Die

by shewho



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Death, Deathfic, Gen, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1777810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The poet’s eyes fluttered shut, blood-clumped lashes causing soft shadows to fall against his cheeks. He took a small fortifying breath and raised his head high, eyes opening to flash tarnished silver at his captors.</p><p>“Vive la France! Vive l’Avenir!”</p><p>The first man lifted his gun.</p><p>And pointed it right at Jean Prouvaire’s heart.</p><p>“Do something,” the blonde leader heard one of his lieutenants plead in a thick voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Certain Poets About To Die

               The streets were silent as rain fell through the city, the slow black of evening dropping in softly to cover them. The rain itself was not the light, pretty variation that graced Paris in the spring; instead, it was the heavy wetness that settled over the city in short bursts at the beginning and end of the summer months, the kind that made any and all Parisians want to duck into the nearest café for a cup of good coffee. A trickle of water slithered from the base of Jean Prouvaire’s skull down the back of his dark blue jacket, causing the lithe poet to seize with involuntary shudders as he scribbled away in a tattered notebook. His words were for naught; like most prophets who hid behind the guise of poetry, he was fated to be ignored and subsequently forgotten.

                Are you quite alright, Prouvaire?” Combeferre asked almost conversationally from his perch on a box a few feet away as the two sat just outside the doorway of the Musain, protected only marginally by the tattered awning overhead.

                “Fine,” he replied, even as his hands shook minutely from the cold.

                The older man shrugged, a long, smooth motion that ended with him standing, hands moving habitually to the pockets of his overcoat. “If you say so.”

                The small poet picked up his head and smiled at the other from where he sat cross-legged upon the ground, his mouth pulling higher on one side than the other, forming a single dimple. “Only if I say so? Then I shall. My fingertips are in the valleys and shores of all the universe’s life. Down in the sounding foam of all the world’s shores I reach my hands and toy with the pebbles of destiny. I have glimpsed beyond the gates of hell many times. I know all about heaven, for I have talked many a lazy hour with God. I know much of the passionate seizure of beauty and also of the marvelous rebellion of man.My name is Truth and I am the most elusive being caged by the universe.”

                Combeferre returned his smile as a warm silence passed between them. “Men sporadically stumble over truth in its basest of forms, but most pick themselves up and dash off as if nothing has ever happened, only pausing to check behind themselves to ensure that no one has borne witness.”

                “What are you two wasting your time waxing poetic about now?” Feuilly called with a roll of his eyes as he trudged past them through the doorway, a substantial stack of paving stones balanced in his arms.

                “Poetic?” Combeferre scoffed. “No! Philosophy, not poetry, will steer the people to the truth.”

                “So you often say!” the red-haired wage earner called back, his voice filtering through the open doors and windows of the café as he climbed the narrow stairway.

                “We speak of truth!” the medical student shouted after him, removing his spectacles and polishing them with the edge of his coat. “Come and join us, if you will, Monsieur!”

                “Come!” Prouvaire called, peering up at the workingman when his face appeared in an upstairs window, feeling the rain spatter his own face. “Come, and spill scarlet!”

                Combeferre cuffed the back of the poet’s head lightly. “Must you be so gruesome in your speech? I find it worrisome and oddly…unsettling.”

                He stood with a chuckle, rubbing his knees to warm them up a bit and shoving the frayed ledger under his coat. “I fear I must. Poetry has a startling tendency to be morbid. It is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. It is the yoking of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. It is the mapping out of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes, a series of accounts of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. Poetry,” he paused, biting his lower lip and turning his face upwards, as if to read words printed across the sky, “Is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white moth-wings and the scraps of a torn-up love-letter.”

                “It is shite, is what it is!” Feuilly called, leaning languidly over the window casing, paying no mind to the rain as it had begun to lessen substantially. “Love? Love doesn’t last. It cannot; its definition is flawed! I laugh at any man who tells me otherwise, even you, Prouvaire!”

                “Shake back your hair, then, oh redheaded boy, and let go your laughter!” he retorted with a laugh on his own lips. “Shake back your hair and let go your laughter, for I see the play of sunfire in your blood and in your heart, so full of riddles and blue shadow. I see No Man’s Land in your eyes,” he continued solemnly, “And landless people, displaced people, and men with lost faces, lost loves, and you among them.”    

                “And in mine?” the bespectacled student beside him inquired, his voice colored with a forced nonchalance .

                “In yours…I see moths in your eyes. Lost moths, a flurried flutter of wings trying to communicate.  Night calls many witnesses. Your moths are the mute ones, who cannot speak and are cursed to spend eternity in silent observation.”

                “And I?” Enjolras queried, emerging from the doorway with Feuilly beside him, the latter of which squeezed past and began once again to gather paving stones.

                “Did I not see your hands struggle to make a series of useless gestures, trying to say with a code of five fingers something the tongue could only stutter, creating thumbprints of dust and blood and dreams?”

                The blonde student huffed in quiet amusement. “I reject your theory of futility, Prouvaire, but compliment you in turn. Dreams indeed; we do what many dream of, all their lives.”

                “Dream of?” Grantaire scoffed as he slouched out of the front room of the café, customary wine bottle in hand. “Strive to do, perhaps, and agonize to do, and ultimately fail in doing.”

                Combeferre, who had understood the way Patria had seduced Enjolras better than the blonde man himself, had once compared her to an affair with a woman of flesh and bone. “It—this—makes you lie,” he had told his chief, “Even to yourself.”

                Enjolras had danced and danced for his Patria, left his bed, and his books, lost sleep, and bled, and lied, and _killed_ for her, and for all of that, she had given up very little in return. It was, of course, Prouvaire who had once urged him, “Never invest yourself in any one thing so deeply and with so much of your own self that its failure will most certainly cost you your happiness.”

                He had invested his very soul in the Republic. Its fate would surely echo his own.

                “It is true, the Republic is a dream,” the blonde leader countered smoothly. “But nothing happens unless first a dream.”

                “Death renders dreams futile,” the artist shot back, coughing over a sip of liquor laced with gunpowder.

                Enjolras snarled, “Enough dead men for the end of time.”

                “Peace, you two!” Joly called from within. “Come, Enjolras, and help me with the inventory. I’ve still yet to get a count of all the weaponry accumulated.”

                With a hiss in Combeferre’s ear that went unheard by all others and a backwards sneer at the dark-haired cynic, Enjolras disappeared back into the Musain.

                “Listen all!” the guide called as he clambered atop the box he had sat upon earlier. “Enjolras has advised that each man take the next few hours to rest, both body and spirit. Feel at ease should sleep find you; your comrades will awaken you when the time comes. Speak not of strategy or rebellious tactics, the time for that will come as well.”

                Slowly, the mob of men separated into smaller clusters and groups. Some were of old friends, boys who had grown up together yet missed each other’s transformation into men. Some were a hodgepodge of men, pasty students and ruddy dockhands and calloused workers.

                The students best known to Enjolras settled more or less together on the barricade closest to the Musain. Grantaire perched on one of Feuilly’s carefully constructed piles of paving stones, drinking from his hip flask and telling the workingman a long, meandering tale from his youth that all of the Amis had heard more than a few times previously as his fingers played mindlessly over the keys of a shattered piano. Bahorel was chain-smoking beside him and nodding absently as he sipped from his own flask, and Combeferre was perched some ways away, staring off into the distance at something none of the others could see, a slight furrow working itself between his brows, occasionally lighting a cigarette of his own. Prouvaire sat amidst them, his notebook in hand, writing away. Marius was dozing, propped up against what appeared to be the remains of a mangled table. Joly and Bossuet were seated on the ground, engaged in what must have been somewhere in the neighborhood of round eighty or so of a very solemn, very bitter card game the pair had going since they had joined the group. Enjolras remained hidden away within the café’s walls, and Courfeyrac had been sent to locate Gavroche, the little gamin that all the students were far more fond of than they would ever have admitted. Gavroche knew the seedy underbelly of Paris simply because he was well-acquainted with it, in the way that Courfeyrac knew Paris’ haberdasheries or that bibliophiles such as Combeferre knew her second-hand bookshops, and as such was an invaluable asset to the group despite his youth.

                As was their custom, the artist and the fan-maker fell into a jovial debate regarding—on that occasion—semantics. They had begun discussing Classical literature, had then moved to the validity of either heaven or hell, and finally to the exact meaning of said words. “Of course hell and heaven are pictured in a different way,” the dark-haired man argued. “Of course; they are opposites. Heaven is soft and warm, while hell is wild, and stormy.”

                “And that is another man’s exact desire!” the other replied. “Perhaps a storm-swept heaven is all a sea captain craves! And hell for some is a jail, for others a factory, for others a kitchen with children crawling along the floorboards, for others a place full of many polite liars.”

“But this question of variation matters not without a definitive answer to another dimension’s legitimacy,” Combeferre pointed out, always the philosophical voice within the discussion.

                “Does it, though?” Feuilly replied, his chin in his hand. “Either way we feel fear. We are afraid. What are we afraid of?”

                The bespectacled student shrugged, “We are afraid of what we are afraid of. We are afraid of this, that, these, those, them.”

                “Still,” Grantaire barked through a laugh, “What are we afraid of? We are afraid of nothing much, nothing at all, nothing in the shape of god, man, or beast. We see Death and look in its eye and laugh; ‘You are the beginning or the end of something, I’ll gamble with you. I’ll take that chance’.”

                “And we, us, the people, tomorrow perhaps we may murmur, ‘Let us have summer roses and tawny harvests and springtimes and dreamy blue twilights’,” the poet mumbled, turning to lean upon the stones behind his head. “Let us have this.”

                The men sprawled together on the ground, on the heaps of shattered furniture piled behind them, touching in all sorts of places; hips, waist, shoulders, head. That was what it felt like to be loved, Jehan decided, and it was good, even if it couldn’t last.

                “Come out of there, Enjolras!” Bahorel called loudly, cupping his hands to be heard over the low din of voices. “There is neither map nor list that you’ve not yet memorized!”

                “Yes, come out with us!” Bossuet bellowed cheerfully.

                “Come out,” Jehan echoed, softer than the others as was his nature. “Out into the filmy persistent drizzle on the streets of Paris. Out into the street where men are sneering at kings.”

                For years, Patria had watched over and guided them, whitewashing dissent and discontent in layers of blind hope. And, for a short while more, at least, the veneer of unity endured.

*

                After the attack, the role was called and one man remained unaccounted for.

                He was not amongst the dead who were killed in a red rose flash, elbows, ankles, all limbs tied to the ground by the threads of Death’s shroud, faces canted upwards like leaves to the sun.

                He was not amongst the wounded who tied cravats and kerchiefs over wounds and called for antiseptic, for water, some gasping at wounds, some with death rattling in their throats.

                He was not amongst the living who stood tall covered in layers of dust and mud and blood with their hair snarled and smelling of gunpowder.

                He was captured.

                The task fell to Combeferre to inform his leader of this and when he did, and had repeated the name twice when questioned, Enjolras’ head tipped back as he laughed, the sound cracking loudly. Combeferre’s frown deepened considerably, “Are you alright? You seem a bit—”

                “Tired?” the blonde man cut in, his mouth pulling up in a smile that seemed more like a sneer.

                The medical student shook his head. “I would have chosen ‘unhinged’, truthfully. One of your lieutenants has been seized; are you so set on the death of that man,” here he pointed within to where the police spy had be restrained, “That you would risk one of your own?”

                “Yes,” he replied softly, his face lowered in shame for the sleep-deprived laugh that had escaped him moments earlier. “I am set on his death. But less so on the death of Prouvaire. Retrieve him.”

                As the medical student set about formulating a plan, Enjolras moved like a shade through his men, rousing their spirits with a quiet word here and there, and muttering reassurances. Other than the low hum of noise and motion behind the barricade, silence thrummed through the streets, shattered by the occasional stray dog or gamin. Pale light from the torches danced across the barricade, throwing shadows over the men—the boys—huddled beneath it.

                Feuilly had disappeared some while ago, knife in hand, perchance to carve his legacy into something more lasting than the minds of men. Grantaire was not to be seen, either, but he was not consumed with the noble task of Feuilly; it was to be assumed correctly that he had retired to the upper floors to sleep off his drinks. Courfeyrac and Bahorel were seated on the ground, sorting cartridges and dividing them between the men. Bossuet was regaling several younger men with epic sagas of his misadventures and ill luck. Only Joly had failed to find something to keep himself occupied.

                Enjolras sighed, watching from the corner of his eye as the medical student nervously—and rather forcefully—tapped out a repetitive pattern on the seat of the chair in front of him, so hard that his fingertips began to bleed. Climbing off the railing, where he had taken up residence in order to better observe the entire barricade from a higher vantage point, the blonde stepped forward and grasped the younger man’s shoulder through his thin coat, the sudden movement startling the smaller of the two to look up. Enjolras sank into a crouch and grabbed Joly’s hands between his own, caring not for the blood that dripped slowly down his wrists. “Joly,” he murmured, the volume of his voice doing nothing to diminish the conviction, “He will be alright.” The boy nodded slightly without a word, relishing in the calming pressure of his own fingers pressed between the chief’s palms for a bit before standing slowly and drawing a shaky breath.

                “I’d best see how much antiseptic we’ve got left, shall I?”

                Enjolras nodded gravely, standing as well and returning to his seat, wearing a quiet understanding about his features.

*

                Daybreak came first in thin splinters shimmering flame blue in the east. Yet even in the dim light of the morning, the silhouette was unmistakable as it shambled forward; youthful but broad shoulders, a thin chest leading to a jarringly concave stomach and narrow hips, a soft haze of sandy auburn hair tousled in the chaos.

                Jean Prouvaire had reentered the barricade.

                He stumbled along, supported and steered by the meaty hands which completely encircled his biceps. His eyes were covered by his own torn silk handkerchief; the perfect vision of Iustitia. He held his head high, even as blood from innumerable injuries hidden by the tattered cloth soaked poppy-red stains into the thin yellow fabric.

                His stride was halted abruptly when those on either side of him paused, letting his own motion continue forward for a moment before falling back against the hold of his captors. The scrap of fabric around his eyes was ripped away and he realized that he was once again at the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, but on the wrong side, the side of the National Guard. This he had not expected.

                He glanced up around himself, ignoring the hands wrapped tight around his upper arms, absorbing the damage done in his absence. The walls of all the buildings surrounding their barricade were pockmarked with small arms fire. Trails of blood, equally bloody footprints, empty cartridge cases, and broken bits of paving stones littered the street. Every window in the three story building behind the students had been shot out, remaining fringed in jagged-edged glass.

                “Last words?” one man behind him gruffly stated, his toned jaded as if—and this was true—he had relayed them many times before.

                So. They meant to kill him. He pushed back his shoulders as far as he could, still being bound by two men nearly twice his own size. “What is that the old philosophers say?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “‘The deadest deaths are the best’? Death comes but once; let it be easy. Black horizons, come up!” he called, noticing small movements along the edges of the barricade. “Come, and kiss me. People of the eaves!” he cried, turning his face towards the shuttered windows and locked doors surrounding him, and biting back a laugh bordering on hysteria, “I wish you a thousand thanks. It is something to face the sun and know that you will die, to hold your head in the shafts of daylight slanting the earth and know that your heart will not beat tomorrow and that your blood will run clean in the gutters by nightfall.” He paused, drawing a breath that tasted of gunpowder and dirt, savoring the essence that coated his mouth and throat. “It is something.”

                He thought he heard his name called, called back from behind the barricade. Perhaps it was so. Perhaps he imagined it.

                “I have pounded at useless doors and called my people fools,” he chuckled, a tight, slightly bitter, humorless chuckle. “My people _are_ fools. My people are young and strong. My people are terrible workers and glorious fighters. My people must learn. They must learn that nations begin young, in the same way that babies do. They struggle, they grow up, they toil, fight, laugh, suffer, die. They follow the laws set by the night, morning, afternoon, evening, and night again. They stand up and have their day, and leave behind flags, slogans, alphabets, voices, roars, songs, numbers, tools, love, gold, promises, savings, tales of flaming passions and performances, moths, manuscripts, memories. They do not often leave names. Faded off into the twilight, the names are forgotten, nothing in the air but songs, and no singers, no mouths to know the songs, and no names for the singers, and red daubs of dawn on summer mornings, and the rain sliding off shoulders like drops of blood, and voices singing, singing, silver voices, singing softer than the stars, softer than the mist. And this will be all? No, this is not all. A new world is dawning; the sun chooses this hour to rise. Yes, some will die. Some will leave long loops of blood behind them, red ribbon tails running from the red ball sun. This will be all. This will be all, this will be the end, but it is not farewell. Farewell is a loose word, flimsy at its best, a yellow ribbon fluttering in the wind.”

                The poet’s eyes fluttered shut, blood-clumped lashes causing soft shadows to fall against his cheeks. He took a small fortifying breath and raised his head high, eyes opening to flash tarnished silver at his captors.

_“Vive la France! Vive l’Avenir!”_

                The first man lifted his gun.

                And pointed it right at Jean Prouvaire’s heart.

                “ _Do something,”_ the blonde leader heard one of his lieutenants plead in a thick voice.

                But Enjolras did not know what to do. It was Prouvaire, after all, one of the best of them. Romantic, shy, clever, beautiful, intrepid, soulful, witty, remarkable, _young_ Prouvaire who had been taken and tortured.

                Jehan was broken, bruised, and bloodied. His long, thin fingers, perpetually stained with ink, had been snapped apart like twigs. His wrists were chaffed and bloodied from where he had struggled valiantly against the bonds that had earlier held him, blood crusted under his fingernails and in the creases of his hands.A string of pale purple bruising lined the side of his neck where thick fingers had grabbed him and held tight. His lower lip had split and subsequently begun to scab. Flakes of crusted blood remained where they had dried beneath his nose. A large gash over his eyebrow still bled heavily, stripes of blood oozing down around one of the poet’s eyes, along the curve of his cheek and the side of his nose.

                “Wait!” Combeferre called, hoisting his hastily constructed white flag of truce high. “We have one of your agents; let us trade for our own man!”

                Silence snapped outward following his cry, shrouding the entire street in an utter and all-consuming absence of sound. The moments dragged out, each one growing longer in the absolute stillness, strained like a line pulled to the brink of snapping.

                The poet looked like an escaped ghost, with his pale eyes that seemed to stare right through the other students. Those eyes rose to the barricade and scanned the top of it before coming to rest on one man, holding oddly still, flashing gunmetal gray without comment. He saw the man’s gaze turn on him, eyes a horrible mixture of equal parts affection and fear.

                There was a sharp crack, followed by another, and another, and another.

                At first, he didn’t feel the shots as they sailed through him. All he noticed were the colors—red blood, blue sky, black silhouettes thrown from the barricade, Combeferre’s white flag lying dirtied in the street when it fell from his hands.

                And then there was pain.

                Everywhere.

                He was nineteen years old and in the worst physical pain of his life.

                It was a sharp, cold pain, like a cut from an unsheathed razorblade, stabbing, slashing at stomach, thighs, chest, arms as bullets tore through his body, obliterating whatever delicate bones and muscles attempted to stop them. His entire body recoiled, trying instinctively to curl into a ball, his arms burning and throbbing painfully as blood saturated his sleeves. All he could hear were the screams—those tumbling over the stacks of furniture, and the one ripped from his own throat.

                He could feel the blood pooling in his lungs, in his chest cavity. His heart felt like it was trying to beat without any blood in it; a logical conclusion, he decided, as his mouth filled with blood—coppery-metallic—when he opened it to scream.

                He had thought that he was prepared, but he was wrong.

                He was going to die and he did not want it.

                The paving stones were slippery from the rain and his own blood and he started to fall.

                Fall.

                Fa…

                _“Jehan!”_

                The cry was anguished, ripped from the center of the man’s chest, and wrought with such pain that it could only have come from the mouth of a lover.

                The poet’s long, shattered fingers twitched as blood puddled beneath his cheek, saturating his hair. The day would dawn. His friends would fight on. The revolution would succeed.

                With a soft, wet sound, Jean Prouvaire breathed his last.

*

                On the upper floor of the Musian, Grantaire heard a shot rip the night air apart. Then another. And another. And a fourth. He rose shakily to his feet, peering through the rough-edged, shattered window pane. Piercing screams filled the air, disbelief and distress coloring them as they built to a horrifying crescendo. The dark-haired artist’s eyes roved wildly over the scene below him, until he found the source of the students’ panic, just beyond the barricade. He sank to his knees, hands rising to cover his ears, trying in vain to block out the sounds of his friends, his _friends,_ screaming. Still, he could hear them through the walls and his palms, wordless noises of agony and the same name again and again.

*

                “They’ve killed him!” Combeferre cried.

                Enjolras’ eyes snapped upwards. The blood had leached out of the other student’s face so that he appeared nearly ten shades paler than normal.

                Enjolras saw white. His vision went blank, a bright blinding flash of anger exploding behind his eyes. Barely harnessed rage thrummed through him, pure uninhibited energy, making his usually steady hands shake. His skin seemed foreign and too hot but his insides felt as if they’d been flooded with ice.

                Beside him, he sensed rather than saw Combeferre reach out and grab Feuilly by the shoulder as the other lurched instinctively towards a gap in the barricade, intending to bring back the corpse of Prouvaire. The medical student was whispering harsh and low in the workingman’s ear, saying, “Don’t, Feuilly. The risk is far too great. It isn’t worth it. He wouldn’t want this, wouldn’t want you to risk yourself.”

                To his credit, Feuilly struggled mightily against Combeferre’s hold, “He is ours, and now he is _gone._ We are obligated to retrieve him!”

                “I forbid it.” Both men froze, as did all those around them, staring at Enjolras. “They have tortured and shot a child,” he continued, “Do you not think they will shoot you as well? You have said so yourself, Feuilly; Prouvaire is gone. And what of it? Let the dead be dead.”

                “Let the dead be…Enjolras!” he cried, disbelieving. “You cannot be serious!”

                “I am madly serious.”

                Feuilly’s jaw steeled. “Very well,” he replied, his voice dangerously low, “You for your grief and I for mine. Let me have a sorrow of my own if I wish to. You speak of the rights of man; well, I have a right to feel my throat choke about this. You take your grief—or leave it here; I care not—and I shall take mine.”

                But the blonde man heard the other’s words with a six second delay, as if he were listening to Feuilly from underwater, and by the time he opened his mouth to reply, Combeferre had taken him by the elbow and the two of them had gone to find a little comfort in someone else. The students who had known him cried salt tears over the beautiful beloved body of Jean Prouvaire, because they were glad he lived, and had loved with open arms, because he was a true egalitarian and believed to his core that love was a cheap things the belonged to everyone, as cheap as the sunlight, and the morning’s dew.

                The stone-faced blonde stood silent for a moment, remembering an intrepid young man, sunny with freckles, whose reckless laughter spread everywhere, a lover of life, a lover of children, a lover of all that was free, a lover of the bells of a song and the spider-lace of a laugh, a lover of red hearts and red blood the world over.

                His carbines fell unheeded from his shaking hands as he turned and stalked into the café, the heels of his boots crunching against the floor, awash with crushed glass. He paused a moment, regarding the spy bound within with contempt and revulsion before backhanding the man across the face. His cold, blue eyes were red-rimmed and brimming with fury as he leaned forward and hissed, “Hear that, Inspector? Your friends have just signed your death warrant.”

*

 _Anyone else. Take anyone else. Please, God. Please._ It was so selfish, but he didn’t even care. He would have killed any one of his friends—his brothers—in an instant if it meant that he could have Jehan back.

Images flitted across the closed lids of his eyes in a dizzying array of colors. Jehan, ink-stained fingertips leaving smears across his forehead and the side of his nose as the poet’s long fingers traced the curves of his face. Jehan, cheeks flushed and wind bitten a deep pomegranate color with cold, melting flakes of snow seeping into the dark wool of his coat, standing in his doorway with a bottle of wine in hand and his lower lip caught tight between his teeth. Jehan, pale limbs and long hair spread out across his sheets in chaotic beauty. Jehan, telling the air itself of his own superiority, proclaiming his wisdom to be beyond the sun. Jehan, stopping to peer at bumblebees on bright afternoons. Jehan, head in his lap, laughing and rolling away from him to bury his face in the fresh spring grass. Jehan, thin hands fluttering at his waist, face pressed into his neck, the poet’s nose and lips cool against his heated skin. Jehan, sprawled in the street, in the dirt and blood, his own blood. Jehan, the empty gaze of that last blood-soaked moment.

                Inside he was howling, an awful, animalistic noise of anguish. On the outside he didn’t make a sound. _It should have been me,_ he thought, and wrapped his arms around himself as he shook, too cold to cry properly. _God, it should have been me._

*

                All were ultimately killed.

                Joly knelt in the mud, hunched over Bahorel’s supine body, his hands pressed tight to two of the three wounds ripped into the law student’s skin, face twisted in horror, frantically struggling to keep some type of compression against the steadily bleeding wounds as red welled up thickly through his fingertips. The law student—but not a lawyer; never a lawyer if it could be at all helped—died with the mumble, “ _Je n’appartiens pas à la loi_ ,” on his lips, for so should a proud man die a proud death.

                Bossuet, Lesgle, Laigle de Meaux, was the third to die at the barricades. He was not shot like Prouvaire, not stabbed like Bahorel; he drowned. He drowned, lying facedown in a puddle, trying to muster enough strength to roll over so he could breathe again. Not exactly an easy task, with two broken kneecaps and blood running into his eyes from a cut in his forehead and his limbs growing colder and more leaden by the moment.

                Feuilly had scaled a pile of rubble to slash with his saber at the guardsmen pouring over the top of the barricade. As he cleaned the blood of one man from his blade by thrusting it into the torso of another, his head suddenly snapped to the side, a hole in his temple, and he fell with a sickening _thud_ to the ground, picked off by a sniper in the rooftops above. He had accepted France as his mother, and gave himself to his Patria until there was nothing left to give.

                In typical fashion, Courfeyrac was at the centre of the chaos. He was covered in blood—his own and that of others—and was wiping it from his eyes when he staggered backwards, a red stain spreading over the front of his shirt. His face was drenched with sweat and blood, his newly reclaimed hat cockeyed, and his usual vibrant smile was nowhere to be seen. The smile of Courfeyrac was lost forever under his hat.

                Joly, in his rounds throughout the wounded and dying and dead, had been nearly hit by a bullet that scrapped the blade of his shoulder and had had his nose broken by either a brick, a fist, or a rock of some sort. He cried out as he watched Courfeyrac fall, his blood-soaked hands outstretched as if to catch him, and an instant later, his throat exploded as a bullet ripped through it.

                Three soldiers—some of the youngest that the National Guard had to offer as fodder—stabbed their bayonets deep into the chest of Combeferre in misaligned retribution for a collaborator of theirs they believed he had slain. Though in truth the medical student had only been trying to help his fellow man, he had only time to look one last time up at the gray sky, ragged holes standing out in the clouds, once more before he died.

                Enjolras’ face wore a grim mask of persistence as he stood to face the guardsmen for a final time. The blonde’s hair was dark with sweat and a cut on his forehead darkened some of the blonde to black over eyes that blazed bright with a fiery combination of pain and dread. The urge to cry, to scream, to sob bubbled beneath his skin but the shame of knowing that he alone shouldered the blame for the deaths of his friends kept his lips pressed together in a tight line of white, as if a needle had stitched his mouth shut.

                Beside him stood a man he barely dared to call his equal or brother, now that his own words were to become outright lies for indeed—like himself—Grantaire was quite clearly capable of both living and dying.

                One swore he was no speechmaker at all, but he could if he wished to, did so best with one foot on a tabletop, wine glass in one hand and the other left free for gesturing. One spoke as if driven by the hands of gods and attended by the heavenly hosts. And both were lights, light snuffed out, no warning, no lingering, then gasping and falling with finished heartbeats, dead.

*

                Jean Prouvaire shouted, “Liberty, brotherhood, freedom, or death!”

                And the government laughed and the government shot him. But Death was stronger than the government because the government was made of men, men of flesh and blood and bone, good men, men like Prouvaire. And while the government laughed, the men of the government wept as they went to bury him, the boy that nobody knew the name of, Jean Prouvaire. They lay him away, knowing full well that he would have many tomb companions, the martyred of the Republic; they knew for they buried these men as well.

                But the government forgot one thing that Jean Prouvaire never had: that governments are made of men and men die and then Death laughs.

                And so, they lay him away, the boy whose name was known to none, under muck and stone, without music or roses, under a flag that he would not claim as his own, that he would tear down did he still walk and breathe.

                And one man, one boy who grew up to become a man, stood alone in the ruined shell of the café once called Musain years later, and when a passerby asked him what his business there was, he replied with a gleam of sorrow deep in his eyes, “There is nothing to say; ask me no questions.”

**Author's Note:**

> I just really hate Hugo's treatment of Prouvaire's death and how it doesn't exist anywhere else...so I fixed it! :) I really hope you enjoyed this; please let me know what you thought!


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